A visit to prairie dog towns in Odessa was not on my agenda during a recent vacation to Big Bend National Park.

But a mountain bicycle accident had me laid up for week in the city’s hospital, while Kathy gave me daily reports about prairie dogs she had seen between the hotel and the hospital. She told me how the squirrel-size mammals stood smartly on their hind legs atop cone-shaped dirt mounds over an intricate network of subterranean abodes forming their townships.

On a summer evening years ago, I dined with a group of friends at a rural Midwest restaurant where the parking lot was a patch of rough ground without marked bays. We came out to find a Cadillac parked close in beside our car. Edging into the gap between the vehicles (the other side was also tight), we did our best to get the doors far enough open to slide in without dinging the Cadillac. Our close approach triggered the Cadillac’s motion-sensitive theft alarm. A loud synthesized voice told us: “You are standing too close to the car! Step! Away! From the car!”

1Department of Biology, University of South Dakota , Vermillion, South Dakota.

Abstract

Maintenance of sylvatic plague in prairie dogs (Cynomis spp.) was once thought unlikely due to high mortality rates; yet more recent findings indicate that low-level enzootic plague may be maintained in susceptible prairie dog populations. Another hypothesis for the maintenance of sylvatic plague involves small mammals, other than prairie dogs, as an alternative reservoir in the sylvatic plague system. These hypotheses, however, are not mutually exclusive, as both prairie dogs and small mammals could together be driving sylvatic cycles of plague. The concept of a bridging vector has been used to explain the transmission of pathogens from one host species to another. In the case of sylvatic plague, this would require overlap in fleas between small mammals and prairie dogs, and potentially other species such as carnivores. Our goal was to evaluate the level of flea sharing between black-tailed prairie dogs (Cynomis ludovicianus) and other small mammals in a mixed-grass prairie in South Dakota. We investigated the species richness of small mammals and small-mammal fleas in a mixed-grass prairie system and compared findings with previous studies from a short-grass ecosystem in Colorado. Over the summer field seasons 2014-2016 we live-trapped small mammals, collected fleas, and showed differences between both the flea and small mammal composition of the two systems. We also recorded higher densities of deer mice and lower densities of northern grasshopper mice in mixed versus shortgrass prairies. We confirmed, as is the case in shortgrass prairies, a lack of substantial flea species overlap on small mammal hosts and fleas from prairie dogs and their burrows. Moreover this study demonstrates that although small mammals may not play a large part in interepizootic plague cycling in shortgrass prairie ecosystems, their role in mixed-grass prairies requires further evaluation.

Grief and mourning are more widespread among nonhuman animals (animals) than previously thought (please also see). Today, while riding my bike north of Boulder, I observed an interaction between an adult Black-tailed prairie dog who looked to be a female and a youngster who had been killed by a car. It looked like the accident had happened a few minutes before I happened on the sorrowful scene. I was astounded by what I saw, so I stopped and dictated some notes into my phone that went as follows:

I just watched an adult prairie dog who I think is a female trying to retrieve the carcass of a smaller prairie dog off the road five times – she clearly was trying to remove the carcass from the road – I stopped and finally after the cars stopped she dragged the carcass off the road, walked about 10 feet away, looked at me and looked at the carcass, went back to the carcass and touched it lightly with her forepaws, and walked away emitting a very high-pitched vocalization.

I waited a few minutes to see if she would go back to the carcass and she began to move toward it, looked at me, and stopped — so I left because I didn’t want to disrupt her saying good-bye if that was what she was going to do — minutes later, when I finally caught up with another rider who was about 100 meters ahead of me, he told me he saw her try to remove the carcass from the road twice.

Con Slobodchikoff and I approached the mountain meadow slowly, obliquely, softening our footfalls and conversing in whispers. It didn’t make much difference. Once we were within 50 feet of the clearing’s edge, the alarm sounded: short, shrill notes in rapid sequence, like rounds of sonic bullets.

We had just trespassed on a prairie-dog colony. A North American analogue to Africa’s meerkat, the prairie dog is trepidation incarnate. It lives in subterranean societies of neighboring burrows, surfacing to forage during the day and rarely venturing more than a few hundred feet from the center of town. The moment it detects a hawk, coyote, human or any other threat, it cries out to alert the cohort and takes appropriate evasive action. A prairie dog’s voice has about as much acoustic appeal as a chew toy. French explorers called the rodents petits chiens because they thought they sounded like incessantly yippy versions of their pets back home.

On this searing summer morning, Slobodchikoff had taken us to a tract of well-trodden wilderness on the grounds of the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff. Distressed squeaks flew from the grass, but the vegetation itself remained still; most of the prairie dogs had retreated underground. We continued along a dirt path bisecting the meadow, startling a prairie dog that was peering out of a burrow to our immediate right. It chirped at us a few times, then stared silently.

“Hello,” Slobodchikoff said, stooping a bit. A stout bald man with a scraggly white beard and wine-dark lips, Slobodchikoff speaks with a gentler and more lilting voice than you might expect. “Hi, guy. What do you think? Are we worth calling about? Hmm?”